| "Had we but world enough and time…" is Auerbach's chosen epigraph to Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. This is a quote from Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress", a poem in which the poetic speaker attempts to seduce his mistress by drawing her attention to the finiteness and transience of time and life ("The grave's a fine and private place, / But none, I think, do there embrace"). It is a complaint about lacking time: if only the lover had enough time, he would be able to adore his mistress forever. | The epigraph in Derrida's Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money is also a complaint about lacking time: "The King takes all my time; I give the rest to Saint-Cyr, to whom I would like to give all." Madame de Maintenon appears to have no time to do what she would really like to do--to give all her time, to give it all, to Saint Cyr. |
| Two epigraphs, one complaint: there's not enough time. Yet, it is this very lack that enables things to happen and that produces results. | |
| Auerbach lacks the world and time--or, at least, the books needed to write a history of mimesis--but this lack is what gets the book written. The lover of "To His Coy Mistress" lacks time to properly adore his mistress--but it is ultimately the finitude of youth and life that will propel the relationship to consummation. If the lovers did not lack time, nothing would happen. |
In the case of Madame de Maintenon, it is the King that is the constraint creating the lack; she has no time because the King takes it all from her. But it is also the King--by taking away all Madame de Maintenon's time, by perpetrating this lack--who enables her to give, if nothing else, the desire to give to Saint Cyr. This desire to give is perhaps the remainder, that nothing which is also something. She has nothing, yet she gives something, or rather, desires to give something. After the King's death, Madame de Maintenon loses all status and enters Saint Cyr, not as a giver, but as a receiver of its charity. No longer lacking, now that the King is dead, Madame de Maintenon can also no longer give. |
| In short, lack is paradoxically both a constraint and an impetus. If we really had "world enough and time," perhaps nothing would ever get done, because nothing would ever have to be done. | |
Janice Ho
